Beast Triad · Press kit
Every critter in Clover Meadow settles an argument the same way, with a deck of animal cards and a 3×3 board. Place a card beside a rival's, and if your number is higher, their card flips to your side.
Twenty-four critters from five habitats, eight rivals to beat, and Same, Plus and Combo flips that can turn a lost board around in one move.
73 seconds · 1920×1080, 30 fps · captured from the game running in the Playdate Simulator, shown at 4× with the Playdate screen’s own grey tones · trailer.mp4
Beast Triad is a cozy animal card duel for Playdate. Play critters on a 3×3 board, flip your rivals’ cards with higher numbers, and chain Same, Plus and Combo flips across five habitats.
In the hills above Clover Meadow, the critters settle every quarrel the same way: a deck of animal cards, a wooden table, and a 3×3 board. It is called a bout, and no one has ever lost their temper in one for long.
Each card has four numbers, one per side. Place a critter beside a rival’s card and compare the touching sides. Higher wins the flip, and the card turns to your color. When the nine spots are full, whoever holds more cards wins the bout.
Some spots are habitats. Set a hedgehog on Woods and every side gets +1. Set it on the River and it gets −1. Read the board, the icon in each card’s corner, and what your rival still holds. Then look for Same, Plus and Combo: matching or equal-sum sides flip several cards at once, and every card they flip can keep the chain going.
Take on eight rivals in the Campaign, from Bramble the hedgehog in the Whispering Woods to Queen Mane on the Golden Plains, and win a card from each rival’s hand. Fill your binder with all 24 critters, tune your five-card hand, then take it to a Quick Bout, the Daily Bout, or hand the Playdate across the table for two-player Pass & Play.
All 23 screenshots are in screenshots/1x (native 400×240, pure black and white, exactly as the device draws them) and screenshots/4x (1600×960 in the Playdate screen’s grey tones).
A tiny 3×3 board is one of the best puzzles ever put on a card table: every move changes what your rival can do next. It also fits a Playdate perfectly, with a screen made for crisp cards and a crank that is happy to riffle through a hand.
The name is a nod to Triple Triad, the card game inside Final Fantasy VIII. A triad is a group of three, and a 3×3 board is three rows of three.
Beast Triad began as one question: what if the cards were beasts, and the table sat in a burrow? The critters, their numbers and their habitats grew from there. A hedgehog is strong on its sides and weak on top. A rabbit is quick on the left and careless everywhere else. An eagle owns the sky and nothing else.
The whole game is drawn for Playdate’s 1-bit screen: cards are white or black, art plates are engraved line-work with hatching, the table is a fine dither, and every menu is a rounded card of its own.
Two short chiptune loops, one for the menus and a brisker one for bouts, with a square-wave lead over a soft triangle bass. Every flip in a chain plays one step higher, so a big Combo climbs the scale.
Pixel art is 1× at heart. Scale it by whole numbers only (2×, 3×, 4×) with nearest-neighbour sampling, so every pixel stays square.